Adult film actress Richelle Ryan is a conservative, and she’s not apologizing for it. She wears clothing bearing former President Donald Trump’s face and name across her social media platforms.
She is among a handful of adult performers that remain outspoken about their conservative identity in an industry that’s on edge amid the growing concerns about Project 2025 — a 900+ page far-right policy wishlist for Trump if he wins in November. One of the measures calls for an outright ban of pornography.
The document was authored by Trump loyalists, some of whom worked for his first administration, stoking fears that if Trump gets elected this wishlist will become the law of the land. Some conservative performers aren’t buying that idea, but others to their left see Project 2025 as an existential threat to their industry.
This comes at a time when Vice President Kamala Harris is Trump’s opponent. As senator, Harris supported the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act and Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (FOSTA/SESTA), legislation that was anti-sex trafficking in theory but in practice made it harder for online sex workers to do their jobs safely. Because the stakes are so high for the business, performers haven’t been shy about sharing their point of view.
Project 2025: Scare tactic or actual threat?
As early as the fifth page, Project 2025 calls for the imprisonment of porn performers as well as distributors, and says that telecommunications companies that allow porn to be accessed should be closed:
Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.
Conservatives like Ryan suggest it’s representative of the fringe of the party — not the majority — and has no chance of becoming actual policy. That’s why, in her view, Project 2025 is less of a Republican master plan, and more of a tool that Democrats are using to campaign.
“I think it’s a scare tactic that Democrats are trying to use,” Ryan told Mashable.
The Trump campaign clearly sees the political implications of embracing such far-right talking points. That’s in part why the former president has distanced himself from it in the past few weeks. To Ryan, that’s one of the reasons not to worry.
“I’ve been in the adult film industry for 18 years. Scare tactics are something that we fight every single day,” Ryan added.
A slew of policy decisions have put immense pressure on the industry in recent years, ranging from propositions about condom use to state-level laws that would force phonemakers to automatically censor sexual content.
FOSTA/SESTA, however, which Trump signed into law in 2018, has had tangible effects on online sex workers and their income. According to a paper published in the Fordham Law Review, the wording of the legislation actually does more to harm sex workers than protect victims of sex trafficking. That’s echoed by research published in the Anti-Trafficking Review that shows that the closure of classified site Backpage.com and the subsequent laws actually put sex workers in dangerous positions by removing an online space where workers can vet those soliciting their services.
The research shows ways that the laws have limited workers’ ability to share harm reduction resources, like lists of people known to solicit sex workers who have a history of assault.
Not everyone sees Project 2025 as merely a scare tactic. In fact, most of the performers Mashable spoke to see Trump distancing himself from Project 2025 as a farce. Trump lied more than 30,000 times during his presidential term alone according to The Washington Post.
“I think that we need to look at Project 2025 and recognize that this is a clear and present danger for the sex worker community. We have to call it out. We have to take it very seriously and educate people,” performer Allie Awesome told Mashable.
Regardless of Trump’s disavowals of Project 2025, he’s still mentioned by name hundreds of times in it. A recent analysis from CBS News found that 270 of the 700 policy proposals include past Trump policies and current campaign promises, while 28 of the 38 authors of the document previously worked for the Trump administration. Paul Dans, a former Trump advisor, served as the director of Project 2025 until late July.
Trump’s running mate JD Vance is a clear supporter. He wrote the foreword to an upcoming book called Dawn’s Early Light written by Project 2025 creator and president of far-right think tank the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts.
The Heritage Foundation, which published Project 2025, helped shape Trump’s Supreme Court nominee list while he was president. Amid vacancies on the court, Trump appointed Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, and Neil Gorsuch.
The current state of the porn industry
Many in the adult industry consider Project 2025 an obvious threat, as it calls for those who make porn to be imprisoned among other measures.
A number of Republican-led states including Texas, Indiana, and Nebraska have established age-verification laws in recent months — many of which require porn sites to verify someone’s age using government IDs — a move which free speech activists largely see as a trojan horse for broader privacy violations.
One of Project 2025’s co-authors, Russell Vought, who also served as a director of the Office of Management and Budget under Trump, admitted in secret recording that the laws (which the Heritage Foundation lobbied for) work to ban porn through the “back door.”
In the same recorded conversation, Vought claimed that Trump “blessed” Project 2025 and added that the former president is “very supportive of what we do.”
This isn’t the first time Trump took a hardline stance against porn. Ahead of the 2016 race, he signed onto a pledge that called on him to ban adult entertainment.
The appointment of JD Vance, who told Catholic publication Crisis Magazine in 2021 that he wanted to outright ban porn as well, does not quell fears.
The perceived imminent threat has created a divide among performers. “I do not have solidarity with Trump-supporting sex workers. I’ve really personally drawn a line in the sand,” Awesome said.
That leaves performers like Mia Isabella in a hard place. Isabella is fiscally conservative and was not a fan of Biden’s tax plan. However, Isabella said, “Trying to tell people what to do in their homes, in their personal time, is weird shit.”
“I agree fiscally with Trump, but I can’t agree with making anyone feel dehumanized or using any minority to politicize the situation and make a rallying cry,” Isabella added.
What about Kamala Harris?
With that said, people in the porn industry aren’t exactly excited about Kamala Harris just yet because of her anti-sex work history.
Historically, Harris supported stiff anti-sex worker policies. As California attorney general, she helped take down Backpage, which was accused of promoting sex trafficking and faced a multi-year investigation led by her office. That led to federal bills FOSTA/SESTA (the latter of which Harris co-sponsored as senator). In addition to making sex workers’ jobs less safe, FOSTA/SESTA also impacted their incomes and access to bank accounts, loans, and lines of credit. Sex workers also said the shutdown of Backpage made them less safe.
“I’ve always been uncomfortable with her being the VP in that sense. And it’s a little bit of a hard pill to swallow,” performer Jessica Ryan, who identifies as a centrist politically, told Mashable.
This comes amid concerns that Harris’ anti-sex work stance may continue if she becomes president. XBIZ, an industry trade publication, pointed out that during this election cycle Democrats dropped language explicitly recognizing sex workers that was included in 2020.
While ads for escort services and pornographic film production are not necessarily one and the same, performers and their advocates believe that that the overarching language and impact of the laws on sex workers is indicative of a perceived ignorance to the needs of those who work in various sex-related professions.
For Jessica Ryan, the election provides two distinct choices: one that hasn’t historically been an ally to sex workers, and another whose closest confidants would like to see porn cease to exist entirely and put its creators in jail.
“It’s just fucking wild that we have people that are okay with [the] government telling us what we can watch [and] how we can watch it,” Ryan added.
All the performers Mashable spoke to shared one common perspective: politics should stay off the set. But the question if Project 2025’s authors get their way is: in a few years, will there even be sets?
